> During their excavations, the scientists also found several artifacts, including charcoal and fragments of broken ceramics. These discoveries suggest that the area’s Indigenous farmers may have dumped their household waste and the remnants of fires onto their fields, using them as compost. Samples taken from the mounds suggest the farmers enriched the dirt with soil from nearby wetlands.
No doubt this practice was used widely across the Americas. The natives were tremendously skilled with plants. This is another step to uncovering some of the knowledge lost. I hope they can find more of these same features.
politelemon 13 hours ago [-]
I wouldn't have imagined broken pottery could serve as compost, how is that made possible? It's clay but it retains some properties even after baking?
brookst 13 hours ago [-]
Pottery of the time was low-fired and did not generally reach vitrification, and it was not glazed with a silica-based glaze that would seal it.
So over time this pottery would absorb water. And especially low-fired bits could totally break down.
Source: amateur ceramicist, and I have first-hand experience with cone 6 clay (vitrifies at 1200c) bisc-fired to cone 04 (1060c) and crumbling to bits when left in water too long.
duxup 9 hours ago [-]
I have some reproduction native American pottery from the upper great plains. They're pretty neat as they have round bottoms. Just holding it feels like given enough time it would break down and melt for sure. It feels very porous.
ruined 8 hours ago [-]
to add some context, in modern gardening things like crushed vermiculite are a common soil amendment. being a porous absorbent mineral, it serves the same purpose.
chongli 4 hours ago [-]
Not to mention terracotta is a very common material for potted houseplants and container gardening. Terracotta is low-fired, non-vitreous and porous to water, giving it nice breathability and water absorption characteristics.
There are also long-necked terracotta bottles (called ollas) you can buy (or DIY) which you bury in the ground. You fill the bottle with water and the terracotta itself acts as a wick, providing a slow release continuous underground water source for plants to access.
hinkley 10 hours ago [-]
There’s a type of low fired clay used in bonsai soil and a harder one used in hydroponics. Good for retaining moisture and they don’t swell and shrink with water.
999900000999 10 hours ago [-]
If you were in the woods( pick a spot) and had whatever food/medicines you needed could you build pottery from scratch.
Electricity is fine and all, but I imagine the basics of civilization could be replicated by a few good craftsmen(people)
hinkley 10 hours ago [-]
Primitive Technology on YouTube does this repeatedly.
You make a hole or find a piece of slate for processing, you mine clay from a stream bed, and then you make your first pot as a tool for moving water, the second pot for making food, and before or after the second pot you make clay bricks to build a kiln to high fire other things more efficiently - less fuel and more multitasking of other tasks.
politelemon 12 hours ago [-]
Thanks this was educational for me.
maxerickson 9 minutes ago [-]
It could just be incidental, some broken pottery unintentionally mixed into fire ash that was intentionally spread on a field.
sologoub 13 hours ago [-]
If you try to make a planting bed in any settlement that’s more than say 100 years old on a site that was continuously lived on, you are guaranteed to come across at least some shards of glass, pots, plates, etc. Even if the spot was never explicitly a trash mound. Things break, people usually try to pick them up and put in trash, but (especially in grass) miss pieces. When kids break stuff you often don’t want them picking up sharp objects. Things get stepped on and pressed into soil. Many many reasons to find pottery shards where they seemingly don’t belong.
pfdietz 12 hours ago [-]
I was also going to say, earthworms will slowly bury objects (Darwin wrote on this), but that region didn't have earthworms at the time.
bastawhiz 12 hours ago [-]
TIL that earthworms in the American northeast are largely invasive species. That's very surprising to me
7thaccount 9 hours ago [-]
Are they problematic though? There were earthworms there before the ice age I think.
maxerickson 7 minutes ago [-]
There's invasive species that are hugely problematic, converting whole forests from fungal decomposition of leaves to bacterial (changing the soil conditions quite a lot).
Also learning about this today. Apparently they're bad for ecosystems that had evolved with slowly decaying organic matter (because they eat it all quickly). In particular forests.
At least in my education they have always been framed as a vital component of the ecosystem and a sign of healthy soil. It's interesting to learn that's not true.
pfdietz 8 hours ago [-]
To some extent it's a matter of definition, and whether being caused by humanity means it's bad. After all, the native earthworms would eventually have migrated north and caused similar changes.
Is it bad that redwoods are doing very well in the UK?
happosai 7 hours ago [-]
The problem isn't "because it was caused by humans" per se. Invasive species because of the speed they migrate. Adapting genetically changing environment is the core of life in our planet, but it takes thousands of generations. Humans spread invasive species much faster than the local fauna can adapt.
edmundsauto 13 hours ago [-]
I have thought about this and figured it was more mechanical (ie drainage) than chemical (nutrients).
fhk 12 hours ago [-]
Yes very established in Hydro and Aquaponics
Clay pellets / balls
mapotofu 13 hours ago [-]
If you added the pottery fragments to the compost pile they would be “baked” again, albeit in a very different environment, and the finished product would have structural diversity closer to soil. Normally that would be rocks, but if your goal is to grow food clay rocks might be better for many reasons.
sublinear 13 hours ago [-]
Just a wild guess here, but isn't all kinds of stuff usually added to soil to help regulate moisture and pH levels?
pfdietz 12 hours ago [-]
Clay also acts to retain positive ions, since the surfaces of clay particles have negative charges.
sfjailbird 11 hours ago [-]
You're all overthinking it. They dumped their kitchen waste in the fields, and it happened to contain broken pottery too. It's the same for other archeological sites all over, many are waste dumps that contain interesting objects.
MangoToupe 7 hours ago [-]
How would you characterize this distinction? It sounds like you're simply describing the same behavior.
pfannkuchen 2 hours ago [-]
Intentional vs incidental?
p1mrx 13 hours ago [-]
They probably couldn't be bothered to sort trash and compost into separate bins.
mc32 10 hours ago [-]
Until further evidence is found it’s premature to say that there is no doubt that it was widely used in the Americas. I think there is doubt though that could be removed with more evidence.
TFA literally says archaeologists discovered the crop(s) using LIDAR and GP links to a project using LIDAR to map lands.
steve_adams_86 14 hours ago [-]
The unanswered questions are intriguing. I wonder if the crops grew better because they were suited to the climate, but those crops aren’t around anymore? Could they have cultivated varieties of corn over say 1000 years that grew well at that latitude and in the relative cold? Or could there have been warmer micro climates?
Maybe not. Even corn specifically developed for my area in British Columbia needs a very warm summer to do well.
I wonder if it’s possible that they used corn less as a food crop and more as a scaffolding crop in the 3 sisters system.
asdff 10 hours ago [-]
You'd be surprised but the "landraces" e.g. historic geographically constrained cultivars tend to do better than modern cultivars in certain geographical regions. A modern even GMO cultivar might have a couple of beneficial traits introduced over the course of a few decades of work. Whereas a landrace might have been selected for yield in that area for a thousand years or more, maybe 100x or more as many generations under selection. As such there is a huge interest among a subset of biologists today to catalog all of these remaining landrace crops and the genetic diversity they contain before they are lost, either due to changing climate wiping out their native environment or the modern farmer replacing these cultivars with ones you can buy in bulk quantities from your seed supplier and have more of an export market (some landrace crops aren't fit for export shipping due to fragility of the crop unlike more modern cultivars; bananas are a good example where there are 1000 types grown but only 1 single varietal particularly fit for overseas shipping hits the supermarket).
hosh 5 hours ago [-]
It doesn't take many generations for selective breeding to show improvements in landraces. Even just making sure that volunteers from seeds that were thrown out as food waste were given a chance to fruit and seed starts that process.
One of the more interesting sources of landraces can be found in local seed saving programs, such as ones hosted by local libraries. They are more likely to be viable seeds that is adapting to the local conditions.
kasey_junk 13 hours ago [-]
Corn is grown in the UP with current varieties currently. It’s not commercially viable because the yields are too low to compete with southern mega yield growers in a highly connected market with efficient transportation systems. There isn’t anything fundamentally hard about growing lower yield corn crops at that location though.
masklinn 13 hours ago [-]
It didn’t necessarily need to be highly productive, just more productive than cultivating local stuff, and even if the corn was not necessarily at its most productive it might have been worth it (and with no real replacement) as part of the companion garden, getting just a few ears of corn would still have been worth more than unproductive wooden stakes.
mapotofu 13 hours ago [-]
Or, they had far advanced knowledge of working and remediating soil to grow food. Peat mosses, charcoal, household compost, are all valid soil additives that we now have scientific knowledge to explain how those benefit soil, but they were practicing it in soil that is otherwise unproductive. Given that no one else farmed it in that time it seems that knowledge was lost, but lines up with regenerative agriculture practices we see today.
ashoeafoot 13 hours ago [-]
There are several indicators in the south american jungles of civilisation going through booms and busts. If they would have been significant ahead, they would have colonized europe or china.
mapotofu 13 hours ago [-]
That natives did not colonize Europe or China does not mean they were not highly skilled with plants. What kind of argument are you making?
acdha 11 hours ago [-]
I think they were just engaging in time-honored speculation about how different history could’ve been had a few historical accidents changed. For example, the Mayan civilization collapsed about 500 years before the Spanish showed up due to the worst drought in something like 7k years, so people have speculated about what Mesoamerica might have looked like when contact was made of those millions of people hadn’t died. Repeat for having draft animals, not losing the immune system lottery so badly, etc. Given their martial traditions it’s very plausible that in slightly different scenarios the arriving Conquistadors would’ve been killed or captured and lead to return expeditions.
BurningFrog 2 hours ago [-]
The "immune system lottery" is really why the native Americans were doomed.
They could have caught up with the technology etc and stood their ground. But when 90% of the population dies at or before first contact, the remaining 10% doesn't have a chance.
Pretty sure this would have beaten the Mayas even if they were at the top of their game.
It's pretty wild how world history turned on such a random and completely unknown factor.
ashoeafoot 7 hours ago [-]
They also had a civilization knowledge base within them , which they could have mined. But there wasn't even a united south-north native empire.
thaumasiotes 14 hours ago [-]
> Or could there have been warmer micro climates?
Microclimates? The whole world was warmer. Remember when the Vikings settled Greenland? That was 1000 years ago.
steve_adams_86 14 hours ago [-]
According to graphs I’m seeing, it looks like it was warmer for a period, but then cooler until now. They would have been farming here during a cool period. It’s entirely possible that they established the farm thousands of years ago when it was warm (and warm means about the same temperatures as today), then kept farming throughout the ‘little ice age’ despite crops yielding less. Perhaps that’s what triggered such a huge expansion of the farm land. Or, perhaps there were far more people there than we think. Lots of questions
thaumasiotes 13 hours ago [-]
What graphs are you seeing? This is what the article says:
> Radiocarbon dating suggests the ridges [farming furrows or similar] were initially constructed roughly 1,000 years ago. They were maintained and used for 600 years after that.
Wikipedia says this:
> Erik Thorvaldsson (c. 950 – c. 1003), known as Erik the Red, was a Norse explorer [...]
> Around the year of 982, Erik was exiled from Iceland for three years, during which time he explored Greenland, eventually culminating in his founding of the first successful European settlement on the island. Erik would later die there around 1003 CE
["Erik the Red"]
And this:
> The Little Ice Age (LIA) was a period of regional cooling, particularly pronounced in the North Atlantic region.
> The period has been conventionally defined as extending from the 16th to the 19th centuries
> The NASA Earth Observatory notes three particularly cold intervals. One began about 1650, another about 1770, and the last in 1850
["Little Ice Age"]
And this:
> The Medieval Warm Period (MWP), also known as the Medieval Climate Optimum or the Medieval Climatic Anomaly, was a time of warm climate in the North Atlantic region that lasted from about 950 CE to about 1250 CE.
["Medieval Warm Period"]
The article would appear to suggest that the farm was established near the beginning of the Medieval Warm Period and abandoned near the beginning of the Little Ice Age... which seems incredibly unsurprising.
> They would have been farming here during a cool period.
I see no indication of that.
throwaway2037 2 hours ago [-]
> The NASA Earth Observatory notes three particularly cold intervals. One began about 1650, another about 1770, and the last in 1850
Are these due to volcanic eruptions?
thaumasiotes 1 hours ago [-]
Why do you ask? I'm not familiar with any such theory. Krakatoa erupted in... 1883, which doesn't seem like a good match. And volcanic winters don't seem to last much more than 10 years.
There is a theory that the Little Ice Age was precipitated by the reforestation of land in America as the natives died off from exposure to European diseases. And of course, there's always the theory that it's just something that happened.
14 hours ago [-]
i4i 7 hours ago [-]
Science Mag Podcast covered this as well... with Madeleine McLeester, assistant professor in the department of anthropology at Dartmouth College.
I thought interesting that they have yet to find the village that associates with the gardens.
https://www.science.org/content/podcast/farming-maize-ice-ag...
vram22 7 hours ago [-]
Related: Check out the book Tending the Earth by Winin Pereira, on Other India Press.
It’s amazing how smart our ancestors were and creative and observant based on amateur science and gardening skills. The amount of planning and organization this must have taken would require a large coordinated effort.
cvoss 9 hours ago [-]
But a farmer is a professional scientist and a professional gardener. Living 1k years ago did not make them uninformed or unskilled at their profession. It's quite a modern bias to suggest this is amateur.
firesteelrain 9 hours ago [-]
My use of ‘amateur’ was more about how their methods predate formal scientific institutions rather than diminishing their expertise.
duxup 9 hours ago [-]
"Stuff grows good in this black muck, but floods here and is hard to work in. Let's bring some of it up closer to the camp."
jfengel 13 hours ago [-]
I'm surprised that anything remains. If the area is fertile I'd expect it to be farmland now.
Clearly it was logged for a while, and perhaps they were expecting to cut it down again at some point.
asdff 10 hours ago [-]
What is farmed in this country is land compatible with american farming practices not fertile land. E.G. any mountainous farm region in the U.S. will see basically only farming on the valley bottoms. Whereas many civilizations in the past and present developed terrace farms to make use of the entire hilly region not just the convenient bottoms. It isn't really done in the U.S. due to the cost and the availability of vast quantities of flat farmable land well beyond market need.
Scarblac 13 hours ago [-]
Does anyone know a 3 sisters equivalent native to Eurasia?
swalling 13 hours ago [-]
Asia and Africa have rich historical polyculture traditions.
Was the article edited? I don't see a reference to the phrase "three sisters" on it, it just says "corn, beans, and squash." Did the original headline mention it?
Original HN title was "1k year old 3 sisters crop farm found in Northern Michigan"
I really wish that when titles were edited there was some history, it would make it much easier to understand these little discussions based on the original title.
themadturk 9 hours ago [-]
Thank you! That headline really threw me for a loop.
rusk 9 hours ago [-]
Thank you. The other thing I really wanted to know was why they were arranged in mounds/quilt? I’m guessing it relates to irrigation
alephnerd 8 hours ago [-]
My hunch (based on how my grandfather would cultivate) was to provide a mount of fertilizer for added nitrogen along with the added irrigation aspects.
It's surprising ("I'm shocked, shocked, well not that shocked") how this style of farming somehow made it all the way to my ancestral village for cultivating these New World crops.
Gotta love proto-globalization.
yapyap 13 hours ago [-]
1k year old?
jjtheblunt 13 hours ago [-]
One click away is the article title :
"Massive Fields Where Native American Farmers Grew Corn, Beans and Squash 1,000 Years Ago Discovered in Michigan"
coin 10 hours ago [-]
My thoughts too. Using SI prefix for a thousand years is uncommon.
Exciting - that sounds a lot like Terra preta: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_preta
No doubt this practice was used widely across the Americas. The natives were tremendously skilled with plants. This is another step to uncovering some of the knowledge lost. I hope they can find more of these same features.
So over time this pottery would absorb water. And especially low-fired bits could totally break down.
Source: amateur ceramicist, and I have first-hand experience with cone 6 clay (vitrifies at 1200c) bisc-fired to cone 04 (1060c) and crumbling to bits when left in water too long.
There are also long-necked terracotta bottles (called ollas) you can buy (or DIY) which you bury in the ground. You fill the bottle with water and the terracotta itself acts as a wick, providing a slow release continuous underground water source for plants to access.
Electricity is fine and all, but I imagine the basics of civilization could be replicated by a few good craftsmen(people)
You make a hole or find a piece of slate for processing, you mine clay from a stream bed, and then you make your first pot as a tool for moving water, the second pot for making food, and before or after the second pot you make clay bricks to build a kiln to high fire other things more efficiently - less fuel and more multitasking of other tasks.
Also learning about this today. Apparently they're bad for ecosystems that had evolved with slowly decaying organic matter (because they eat it all quickly). In particular forests.
At least in my education they have always been framed as a vital component of the ecosystem and a sign of healthy soil. It's interesting to learn that's not true.
Is it bad that redwoods are doing very well in the UK?
Clay pellets / balls
There's some interesting examples in the Readme.
Maybe not. Even corn specifically developed for my area in British Columbia needs a very warm summer to do well.
I wonder if it’s possible that they used corn less as a food crop and more as a scaffolding crop in the 3 sisters system.
One of the more interesting sources of landraces can be found in local seed saving programs, such as ones hosted by local libraries. They are more likely to be viable seeds that is adapting to the local conditions.
They could have caught up with the technology etc and stood their ground. But when 90% of the population dies at or before first contact, the remaining 10% doesn't have a chance.
Pretty sure this would have beaten the Mayas even if they were at the top of their game.
It's pretty wild how world history turned on such a random and completely unknown factor.
Microclimates? The whole world was warmer. Remember when the Vikings settled Greenland? That was 1000 years ago.
> Radiocarbon dating suggests the ridges [farming furrows or similar] were initially constructed roughly 1,000 years ago. They were maintained and used for 600 years after that.
Wikipedia says this:
> Erik Thorvaldsson (c. 950 – c. 1003), known as Erik the Red, was a Norse explorer [...]
> Around the year of 982, Erik was exiled from Iceland for three years, during which time he explored Greenland, eventually culminating in his founding of the first successful European settlement on the island. Erik would later die there around 1003 CE
["Erik the Red"]
And this:
> The Little Ice Age (LIA) was a period of regional cooling, particularly pronounced in the North Atlantic region.
> The period has been conventionally defined as extending from the 16th to the 19th centuries
> The NASA Earth Observatory notes three particularly cold intervals. One began about 1650, another about 1770, and the last in 1850
["Little Ice Age"]
And this:
> The Medieval Warm Period (MWP), also known as the Medieval Climate Optimum or the Medieval Climatic Anomaly, was a time of warm climate in the North Atlantic region that lasted from about 950 CE to about 1250 CE.
["Medieval Warm Period"]
The article would appear to suggest that the farm was established near the beginning of the Medieval Warm Period and abandoned near the beginning of the Little Ice Age... which seems incredibly unsurprising.
> They would have been farming here during a cool period.
I see no indication of that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volcanic_winter#Past_volcanic_...
There is a theory that the Little Ice Age was precipitated by the reforestation of land in America as the natives died off from exposure to European diseases. And of course, there's always the theory that it's just something that happened.
https://www.google.com/search?q=tending+the+earth+winin+pere...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Other_India_Press
Clearly it was logged for a while, and perhaps they were expecting to cut it down again at some point.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyculture?wprov=sfti1#Histor...
No, not in the archived version: https://web.archive.org/web/20250612153046/https://www.smith...
Oh, was this mentioned in the original HN title? Has that been edited?
Yes, it was. https://web.archive.org/web/20250615154352/https://news.ycom...
Original HN title was "1k year old 3 sisters crop farm found in Northern Michigan"
I really wish that when titles were edited there was some history, it would make it much easier to understand these little discussions based on the original title.
It's surprising ("I'm shocked, shocked, well not that shocked") how this style of farming somehow made it all the way to my ancestral village for cultivating these New World crops.
Gotta love proto-globalization.
"Massive Fields Where Native American Farmers Grew Corn, Beans and Squash 1,000 Years Ago Discovered in Michigan"